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Walthall wrecked
Katrina damages 3,000 homes, makes mess of county’s timber

Colin Trisler
Enterprise-Journal
Published Friday, September 09, 2005 1:23 PM CDT

If the residents of Pike and Amite counties thought they had a rough go-around with Hurricane
Katrina, they need to look no further than Walthall County to gain some perspective.

Walthall County, by all accounts, was the hardest hit area in southwest Mississippi.

About 3,000 homes in Walthall County were mangled during Hurricane Katrina, but officials are
clearing debris and restoring power, and the area is on the comeback trail, said the county’s
emergency manager Roland Vandenweghe.

Of those 3,000 homes, 400 were destroyed, Vandenweghe said, while the remaining 2,600
residences suffered damage from broken windows to fallen trees on the house.

About 1,000 evacuees from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are spread throughout the county,
but most of them avoided shelters and instead chose to stay with friends and family in the area,
Vandenweghe said.

Union Baptist Church took in about 125 local and out-of-state evacuees at the height of the storm,
and the church continues to feed about 100 people a day, said deacon Seab Brumfield.

Tylertown Baptist church also is serving 4,000 to 6,000 meals daily, said Jim Weickersheimmer of
Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, a volunteer disaster unit working with the church.

“We don’t know how much longer we’re going to keep serving meals,” he said. “The high number
of people coming through is staying pretty consistent. But once that number starts to go down and
the need for food decreases, I imagine we’ll stop then.”

Across the county, hundreds of trees were uprooted or snapped in half, and power is just now
beginning to be return to parts of the area, but despite the destruction,Vandenweghe said he
considers the area fortunate.

“We’re just lucky things are not worse than what we had,” he said. “There were no storm-related
deaths or injuries, and everyone has water. As of yesterday, about 40 percent of the homes in the
county have power. We expect in about two or three more weeks everyone should have power.”

Weeks before power restored

As for the power, Magnolia Electric and Power Association foreman Elton Magee, agreed with
Vandenweghe’s assessment.

“It should be back to normal in about three weeks, that’s county-wide,” Magee said as he and a
power crew worked to repair a damaged circuit that feeds power to parts of Salem and Tylertown.
“This is something we’ve never had. I know this circuit is the hardest hit circuit I’ve ever seen — it’s
75 percent destroyed. But we’re working on it.”

Getting back to normal

Although power is down in most of the area and churches are serving meals to thousands, Walthall
County is beginning to settle back into a normal groove, said chief sheriff’s deputy Glenn Allen.

“The county’s coming back, and everybody’s working real well together,” Allen said. “We’ve stayed
really busy with traffic control, and the city and the county have kinda merged into one big law
enforcement complex. We’re here helping each other to get things back to normal.”

Allen said the law enforcement is working “around the clock — some guys work 12 to 20 hours a
day,” cutting trees and clearing them off the roads, working ice detail and delivering water and
patrolling. “The people were very cooperative,” he said.

The county still is getting three trucks of ice and water a day, Vandenweghe said, and gas lines,
which were long and onerous last week, have now subsided into a normal rhythm of customers.

“At one point, we had 1,000 cars lined up on Highway 98 to get gas at the truck stop,”
Vandenweghe said. “But that all seems to be getting back to normal, too.”

Schools postponed indefinitely

One part of the community that won’t be operating on a normal routine — at least for the next few
weeks — is the Walthall County school system.

Superintendent Gregg Ellzey said school has been postponed “indefinitely, probably two or three
weeks,” because of power outages and the lingering boil water advisory.

Tylertown Primary School principal Norman Hammon, however, said that time frame is fine with him
because it gives his school a chance to figure out how to deal with the kindergarten B-building wall
that collapsed during the storm.

“The wind just sort of sucked the wall right out and blew it down,” Hammon said. “We’re just
thankful it didn’t take the whole building.”

Schools were closed, so the only things in the two affected classrooms that were damaged “was
nothing that can’t be replaced,” said kindergarten teacher Mellonee Simmons.

“It sorta looks like there was a tornado in here,” Simmons said as she and three other volunteers
did their best to straighten up the mess of paper and debris Katrina left. “Some of my classroom
materials and books got wet and mildewed, so we had to get rid of them, but we’re going to make
it. When the students get back, we’re going to get them straight.”

The two kindergarten classes that met in those rooms will be relocated to the first grade building,
Hammon said.

In spite of the damage, Walthall County “will be all right,” Vandenweghe predicted.

“Communication was a big problem from the first day; we couldn’t use phones, no cell phones, no
communication whatsoever. But that eventually got better,” he said. “Debris removal is our biggest
problem now, but we’re gonna make it. We’ve got three chainsaw teams that rotate around the
area and help people with any trees. All people need to do is fill out an application for help, and
they’ll be there.

“The churches are doing a fabulous job, feeding thousands of people everyday. And everyone in
Walthall County cooperated wonderfully; they were as calm as they could be, and the public
officials are a big part of that. There were no ego problems, nobody wants to be the big dog. We
just work together.”